UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE LANDSCAPE OF HOPE AND DISPOSSESSION: VISIONS FOR THE FUTURE IN THE COOKSON HILLS, 1934–1949 A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS By BRENDAN THOMAS Norman, Oklahoma 2021 LANDSCAPE OF HOPE AND DISPOSSESSION: VISIONS FOR THE FUTURE IN THE COOKSON HILLS, 1934–1949 A THESIS APPROVED FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY BY THE COMMITTEE CONSISTING OF Dr. Anne F. Hyde, Chair Dr. Warren Metcalf Dr. Jennifer Holland © Copyright By BRENDAN THOMAS 2021 All Rights Reserved Table of Contents Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………v Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………..vi Introduction: Hopes and Dreams in the Cookson Hills……………………………………….1 Chapter 1: The New Deal Comes to the Cherokee Ozarks: Competing Visions in the Cookson Hills, 1934–1938……………………………………………….………………………………21 The City v. The Nation: Army Camps, Cherokee Nationhood, and Muskogee’s Metropolitan Dreams, 1941–1949…………………………………………………………….………………60 Conclusion: Imperial Decline and the Limits of Resurgence…………………………………..106 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………113 iv Acknowledgements Writing acknowledgements for an MA Thesis is a funny thing. The project is necessarily truncated, and doesn’t exactly lend itself to the sort of years-long, these-people-saved-my-life and taught me everything I know-sort of story. Nonetheless, many people helped me achieve this relatively small, but nonetheless extraordinarily challenging academic exercise. Andy Fisher introduced me to Indigenous history as a freshman in college, and his passion, skill, and most importantly extraordinary empathy put me on the path to graduate school in Western and Native American history. Other professors at William & Mary likewise played pivotal roles in my development as a student of history, and as a person, including Danielle Moretti-Langholtz and Michael Iyanaga. Dr. Moretti-Langholtz always pushed me in challenging directions, and helped me decide to attend OU in the first place. At OU, Anne Hyde has been the sort of advisor I didn’t think really existed in the real world: always kind and encouraging, but never unwilling to give me the sort of unvarnished critique that transformed this thesis into something that is (hopefully) readable. The other members of my committee, Warren Metcalf and Jennifer Holland, have likewise provided me excellent models for rigorous, challenging, and above all—again— empathetic scholarship on Native American and Western history. Their mentorship thus far has proved invaluable. Adam Malka showed me how to read and think critically, and above all how to be a good scholar and citizen of the world. Amanda Cobb-Greetham continues to teach me how to approach the study of Indigenous peoples and cultures in ways that reinforce and uphold Indigenous sovereignty, while acknowledging my place as a non-Native historian. My fellow graduate students have shaped this work in so many ways, and all of them provide such impressive and daunting models of scholarship. John Truden first put this idea in my head on an early visit to the Carl Albert Center on campus. Brooke Hadley, Matt Hill, Austin Schoenkopf, Josh Mika, Thayme Watson, Taylor Cozzens and Charlotte Stutz have all read pieces of work I’ve written, offered thoughtful critique, and also been good hangs when sitting in the library gets a bit dull. Finally, I have to thank the love of my life, Rachel Hall, who has been unendingly patient and supportive of my ridiculous academic dreams, and even volunteered to come with me on this exciting new adventure in Oklahoma. Without her, none of this would be worth it. v Abstract This thesis examines a little-studied moment in Oklahoma’s environmental and Indigenous history: the era of the New Deal, Second World War, and early days of the Cold War. From the 1930s to the late 1940s, as Oklahoma reeled from twin economic and environmental catastrophes, local people, Native and non-Native, attempted to harness the revolutionary possibilities of the New Deal to improve their economic and ecological condition. Rising from the study of one specific area, the Cookson Hills in eastern Muskogee and western Cherokee County, this thesis examines how everyone in Oklahoma tied their future to the transformation of the land. Tying these developments to broader national trends during the New Deal, including rural land use adjustment and increasing urban federal investment, as well as the rise of an incipient national security state, this thesis argues principally for the continuity of two key themes in Oklahoma’s Native American history. First, the ongoing efforts by local, state, and federal actors to transform the state’s land through the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and second, the incredible resilience and political activism of Indigenous peoples within the state, who have fought off decades of efforts by the state to eradicate their political autonomy, to emerge by the late twentieth century as some of Oklahoma’s most significant political and economic actors. Nonetheless, threats to Indigenous land remain constant, even as Native nations continue to rebuild in the early twenty-first century. vi Figure 1: Map of Cherokee Nation, c. 1903. Cookson Hills area marked out by white circle. Courtesy Library of Congress. vii Introduction: Hopes and Dreams in the Cookson Hills From 1967 to 1972, researchers affiliated with the Doris Duke American Indian Oral History Program fanned out across Oklahoma’s Indigenous communities. Their mission, funded by billionaire philanthropist Doris Duke, was to record history “from the Indian’s point of view.”1 Duke had initiated the program in 1966 at several universities across the American South and West, including the University of Oklahoma, spurred to charity by the concerns of scholars that “invaluable knowledge was being lost as the older generation of Native Americans died, taking their knowledge with them.”2 Program researchers thus sought to save a valuable fragment of what traditional knowledge and memory remained in Indigenous communities before the modern urban world consigned this intangible cultural heritage to be forgotten. One of the researchers affiliated with the program was a Cherokee man by the name of J.W. Tyner, and across the late 1960s and early 1970s, he would conduct dozens of interviews with Cherokee old-timers across the rocky hills of the Cherokee Nation, often while driving in his car. His travels would take him to some pretty remote corners of the Cherokee Ozarks, a landscape defined by its steep ridges and narrow river and creek valleys. In February 1969, he traveled to visit Katie Sam, a Cherokee woman born in 1907 and raised along the banks of Greenleaf Creek, an Ozark watercourse that ran through an area known as the Cookson Hills, and which Tyner would characterize as “a clear sparkling stream, having some rich farm land…[and] protected by the beautiful hills.”3 Katie had grown up in this arcadian landscape, enjoying the “untold wealth” of the hill country where her father, Watt Sam, “worked hard to 1 Quoted in Dianna Repp, “The Doris Duke American Indian Oral History Program: Gathering the ‘Raw Material of History,’” Journal of the Southwest 47, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 11. 2 Ibid., 18. 3 J.W. Tyner, “Katie Sam, Some Life History Materials and Related Subjects,” 28 February 1969, Doris Duke Oral History Collection (hereafter DDOHC), Western History Collections (hereafter WHC), University of Oklahoma, Norman (hereafter OU). 1 provide a comfortable home, and farmed his acres well to make a living for the family.”4 Although in her early life Katie had witnessed the forced suppression of the Cherokee Nation politically, and the rapid of much of the Cherokee land base through the federal policy of allotment, these memories existed alongside what, by all accounts, appeared to be a happy and well-off childhood. But, in the 1930s, Katie and her family had been forced from their peaceful home along Greenleaf Creek, as the federal government condemned their land and flooded the verdant valley to create Greenleaf Lake. Forced off their land, with only a “meager pittance” in exchange for their home, the Sams relocated to a “little piece of flint rock land” several miles east along the Illinois River in 1936.5 The family never recovered, and Katie’s parents, Watt and Mary Sam, died soon after “with sad and heavy hearts believing that the future held little for the unification and way of life so hoped for by the Cherokees.”6 The dispossession of the Sams at Greenleaf was echoed in another story Tyner would uncover, this time involving Cherokee families who had made their home just north and east of the Sams, also in the Cookson Hills. In the fall of 1969, he drove down dusty dirt roads to the community of Qualls, an old farming village deep in the Cookson Hills, the highest and most rugged section of the western Ozark uplift. Qualls must have seemed to Tyner and his employers as a vital site of study, a community on the verge of disappearing. Speaking with 60-year-old John Raincrow, whose family had lived there “as long as anyone can remember,” Tyner learned that Qualls had once been a bustling little crossroads town, boasting two general stores, a post office, school, and even a church. Qualls had never been a wealthy place, but most people, according to Raincrow, had never minded that, enjoying the peace and quiet the community 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 2 provided. But in 1942, as the United States went to war across the